There is no doubt that the easiest way to start a garden is to go to a local nursery and buy young plants, ready to pop in the ground. But if you want to grow a particular vegetable or flower variety, planting from seed is the way to go because nurseries are limited in what they can stock.

I hadn’t been to Robert Jakob and David White’s garden since it was last on the Landscape Pleasures tour in 1997. I know I had felt then that it was probably my favorite garden on the East End because it seemed so intensely personal and idiosyncratic.

Do not pause too long in admiration of the finely pruned weeping willow at the rear of the house, whose proportions are as admirable as those of the magic tree at the center of blue willow ware or, as I did, when I reviewed in mid-spring enviously taking in a huge, alluring display of purple hellebores.

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